Just more than a year ago, the Bay Area seemed poised to become the center of the hip-hop universe.

The hyperactive party music known as “hyphy” was ubiquitous at clubs, on the streets and on local radio stations from San Jose to San Francisco, Fremont to Hayward and Oakland, all the way to Vallejo and Fairfield. It had been more than a decade since the Bay Area hip-hop scene had so much buzz – and it was palpable.

Mainstream publications, including Newsweek and the New York Times, featured stories about Northern California’s rap scene being on the verge of exploding nationally. E-40, Mistah F.A.B., the Federation, Keak Da Sneak all were names synonymous with what was collectively being tagged the “Yay Area.”

But something happened – or maybe didn’t happen – between then and now, leaving the hyphy movement listless, with even local popularity beginning to dissipate. The music is not getting as much play on the radio. The few artists that signed with major labels have had their album release dates pushed back to summer and even later this year.

Numerous interviews with industry insiders and the artists themselves have revealed strong agreement as to why the scene may soon be left for dead: bad business decisions.

When dealing with major record labels, artists missed important meetings, asked for too much money and were too entangled in previous independent deals to consider new opportunities.

MTV and the record companies had a difficult time contacting certain artists, says Joseph Patel, Fremont native and MTV News producer of “My Block,” a show that featured the hyphy scene early last year. “And that’s unfortunate, because … you only get one chance to get people’s attention – and some of those artists were kind of blowing it.”

The hyphy culture, which centers on a freewheeling attitude – drugs, partying and reckless behavior – sometimes led to violence at high-profile events, causing outsiders to focus more on that conduct than the music itself. But while that combination of negatives can be seen as obstacles, none has halted popular hip-hop in the past.

“In the Bay Area, hyphy is kind of dead,” says Mistah F.A.B., one of the genre’s most popular artists, who was signed by Atlantic Records in September. “We’ve been doing it for too long,” he says. “A lot of people are getting tired of it.”

Some of his singles, like “Ghost Ride It” and “Sideshow” have been released as singles, but F.A.B.’s major label debut has been delayed from spring to this fall or maybe even winter.

“It’s very, very hard for the Bay Area to be taken seriously by labels,” says Wendy Day, founder of the non-profit Rap Coalition, which helps negotiate deals for hip-hop artists. Among her list of associations are heavyweights such as Eminem, Master P and Twista – all of whom have platinum albums (sold at least 1 million copies). The big record labels, she says, thought hyphy was a fad and was just regional. “Those two things are kind of the kiss of death,” says Day, who also helped F.A.B. negotiate his deal with Atlantic Records.

“Hyphy hasn’t really broken outside of the Bay,” Day says. “It’s still a very local movement.”

One big problem, she explained, was that local artists were locked into messy independent deals that became a problem when the major labels came knocking.

There was one artist who signed up with three separate companies, Day says. “Majors were looking at him for different deals, but people kept surfacing and stopping the deal,” she says. This happens in other parts of the country too, she says, but the difference is the ability to strike a deal so that both sides profit. “Here,” she says, the smaller labels “are more interested in blocking than profiting.”

Complacency set in While Will Bronson, co-founder of the independent label SMC Recordings in San Francisco, agrees in general with Day’s analysis, he says that “blocking” happens everywhere, not just in the Bay Area. The problem, he says, had more to do with complacency than competition.

Everyone was satisfied “with the amount of publicity and the amount of attention we were getting. … And we thought we were doing enough, but we didn’t realize that we have to do even more,” says Bronson, whose label has represented a number of rappers, including B-Legit, Mistah F.A.B. and Keak Da Sneak. “What was good enough for Atlanta, good enough for New York, good enough for L.A. was not good enough for us,” he says. “We still have to build our foundation … we’re out here on our own, fending for ourselves, figuring it out for ourselves.”

Even Keak Da Sneak, who coined the term “hyphy,” admits that for a time, his business side was “haywire.” The rapper, who’s had a prolific but more locally focused independent career of 17 albums with four labels, moved from Oakland to Sacramento. He was making music and setting up his own shows while his cousin was answering phones for him. Now, though some say it may be too late, Keak has hired two investment bankers to help him.

Things are going well, says one of his managers, Johnny Montes, and they are continuing talks with labels and looking for the best ways to get Keak’s music distributed.

Situations similar to Keak’s, many confirm, are common in the Bay Area and help explain why its hyphy sound hasn’t taken off like other regions that became national hip-hop hubs. Examples include the South for its “Dirty South” sound, Atlanta and Memphis for “Crunk,” and more recently Houston, for its “Chopped and Screwed” style. Others point out that unlike those areas, the Bay Area lacks a seasoned music mogul – like Jermaine Dupri or a Lil Jon (both Atlanta-based producers) – who can guide and represent them to the major labels.

The vastness of California is also a factor, says MTV’s Patel. While artists in the southern United States, for example, can play in one area and reach multiple states, Bay Area artists can perform all over Northern California and not even begin to break into the Southern California scene.

In March 2006, rapper E-40 – with Lil Jon as his executive producer – formally introduced the hyphy sound to the nation with his album “My Ghetto Report Card,” which debuted at No.3 on the Billboard 200 and sold about 95,000 copies in its first week and eventually sold almost 500,000 albums.

E-40’s album was a solid start for the genre and by all accounts should have kicked opened the gates for others to follow. But “there was no one ready to follow,” says DJ E Rock, who works closely with E-40 and hosts a Bay Area rap show on Sirius Satellite Radio. “E-40 was hyphy. He was the movement. And it took its course when his record took its course.”

Back in the day This was not always the case for the Bay Area. During the late 1980s and early ’90s, the region’s most notable rap stars sold millions of albums and were tied to established record labels: the X-rated Too Short (Jive), the funky Digital Underground (Tommy Boy), which also launched the career of the legendary Tupac Shakur (Interscope). And who can forget the flamboyant MC Hammer (Capitol).

“Back then, there was more identity, it was more creative to me,” says Rick Rock, a producer who worked with the late Tupac and now with current hyphy stars. “Everybody had their own lane, and it was creative how it was coming – but now … when I hear songs, it’s all saying the same thing.”

Still, the excitement about the scene last year was strong. And major label representatives began swarming in, checking out up-and-coming artists.

Here, too, missteps occurred.

Artists who had little experience negotiating at that level were overestimating their worth.

“These are people who have more friends on MySpace than sold records,” says KMEL-FM music director Big Von Johnson, who helped popularize the hyphy movement by being the first to play many of its songs on the radio in late 2005. The contract requests were inflated, he says, with some asking for $2 million when they had sold only 2,000 records.

“It was bad business,” Big Von says. “There was no sense and no guidance – just children running around doing whatever they wanted to do – burning bridges because they don’t care, and when they don’t show up” for appointments, “`Hey, it’s OK.'”

They were basing their worth more on hype than actual potential to sell, says Sway Calloway, MTV News correspondent from Oakland. Multimillion dollar “deals are very rare unless you have seven figures worth of momentum going into it.”

Momentum was something that seemed to elude the hyphy movement. And by the end of 2006 there were rumblings about where it was headed.

In December, the Bay Area Rap Scene (BARS) awards, a high-profile event that focused on honoring the best of the region’s “urban” music scene – and by default the biggest names in hyphy – drew about 3,500 people to the San Mateo County Event Center. It was supposed to be a showcase event for the scene, but it started late and was shut down early by police because of overcrowding and fights among the audience members.

$100,000 in the red It left the event’s founder, known only as Booyowski, in the red about $100,000 and quite sure that hosting another awards show would not make financial sense.

Despite the letdown at that event, Ozone, a hip-hop magazine based in Orlando, Fla., started a West Coast section in March this year. But that section’s editor, N. Ali Early, already is convinced hyphy’s time is up. “The Bay Area moves so fast. … There’ll probably be something new in the summertime.”

Paul “Big Paul” Tu’ivai, an executive at major label Universal/Motown, who started his career interning in the Bay Area at KMEL, agrees. “I hate to use the word fad, but maybe it is a point in Bay Area history for the next thing to come.”

Hyphy is “not the hottest thing right now,” concedes Young L, 19, the producer and one of the rappers of the Pack, a group out of Berkeley. The group released an independent seven-song album in mid-December, but it sold slowly, and the Pack’s April major label release on Jive Records has been postponed to July or August.

The hyphy sound won’t disappear, says Bronson of SMC Recordings, but it has to evolve. “We can’t keep using the same buzz words. We can’t keep recycling the same tracks. … People liked it because it was fresh and new.” But “it has to go further. We have to be creative. We have to push it forward.”

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